I don’t think I’ve ever said this about any other album: Modest Mouse’s new effort An Eraser and a Maze just SOUNDS like music made in the free streaming age. It’s like the incentive is totally gone. They sound like a bunch of high school seniors who have already gotten into Washington State and are mailing it in on a last-week Moby Dick assignment.
Just to break it down: there’s one type of “bad music” that’s like The Lumineers, where the chord progression sounds like an eighth-grader wrote it, and the lyrical themes are fastened to the romantic realm like industrial adhesive. An Eraser and a Maze is not like that. Track two, that is, “Remember Yourself” [1], has an excellent skeleton of a song in place. The chord progression is elaborate and forceful, and really, the lyrics seem original enough to please your average hipster crowd at a festival, or whatever the applicable rubric might be today.
But we get to the middle part, the part where, say, at least a guitar solo with wah-wah pedal would be great, short of course a banjo, accordion or Moog solo (which would be ideal), and the whole thing just falls flat. It sounds, again, sorry to reuse my earlier analogy, but like the work of an eighth-grader, with a few lifeless, perfunctory guitar notes appearing where some flair or artistic moxie of some sort would be necessary to make this album listenable, let alone good or great.
Does it smart a little extra that it’s Modest Mouse mailing it in in 2026? Is this really worse than Oasis’ and Ween’s procedure of just not doing any recording? I would say, relatively speaking, the reputation of Oasis and Ween are helped by a lack of pointless fluff, into which, more than certainly any prior Mouse album, An Eraser and a Maze does self-categorize. Maybe the public’s response to the excellent and divisive “Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami FL. 1996)” was so rotten and off the mark that Brock developed a disdain for his audience. I thought The Golden Casket (2021) had a lot of questionable material on it, but also “Japanese Trees”; a pithy and enjoyable fusion of psychedelic rock and expedited indie-pop quirkiness. If the well is dry for the band at this point, I’d just as soon they not do any recording at all, rather than demote themselves to what seems like an empty practice in quantitative capitalism and “production” in the “new record” factory.
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[1] You’ll notice I’m omitting discussion of opener “Picking Dragons’ Pockets”; the simple reason being that I did indeed enjoy that tune.
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